Take the A Train, as in Audubon

The Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge along the Queens waterfront is a favorite of birders.CreditStephen Speranza for The New York Times

Of all the primal habitats he infiltrated, John James Audubon, the great illustrator of nature, opted to retire to the upper reaches of Manhattan in the 1840s. He had spent decades roaming the fledging nation’s woodlands to paint the beauty of America’s wild birds that he shot on the wing. He finally couldn’t resist the city, or at least its verdant fringe.

Audubon bought 14 wooded acres on the undeveloped Hudson riverfront near what is now West 155th Street, safely north of “that crazy city,” as he came to view Gotham’s early hub buzzing down on 14th Street. He could have never envisioned himself as an urban brand, but the modern New York City Audubon Society engendered by his work has been ceaseless at promoting that identity. Lately it is pressing its “Birding by Subway” map on the trundled human throngs who could use a good nature break from the daily grind of the wheels.

There are already countless birders in the city, canny citizens who roam such magnetic, splendid habitats as Central and Prospect Parks. They witness lyrical clouds of songbirds in the spring migration. Predatory hawks supply now routine melodrama. Still, that Pelham Bay Park stop up in the Bronx — No. 7 on the society’s top 10 list for subway birding — can offer dedicated spotters a possible twilight glimpse of the annual crepuscular courtship flights of the American woodcock. Think about it: crepuscular courtship in the Big Apple.

No such luck the other day after a ride on the long northern reach of the No. 6 train to Pelham. Then again it was satisfying to be stalked by clever, curious crows blasé about the pop-pop-pop gunfire echoing from the Police Department’s practice range to the north. Pelham birders had hoped to host a rare first nesting in the park by one of the nation’s now resurgent bald eagles. But they found that the osprey couple that held the nest had furiously chased the eagle away. The turf fight might resonate with New Yorkers crowded on the 6 train.

Depending on a subway rider’s pioneering spirit, the long ride to the No. 2 birding stop — Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge along the Queens waterfront — is worth the A train trip to Broad Channel. Birders benefit from some extraordinary human inventiveness that underpins the 300 species swooping through cycles of shorebird migration. The place was a drab urban wasteland until such legendary city naturalists as Don Riepe built the refuge from scratch in the ’50s. They began stocking it with grass, trees, toads, snakes and the first nests that, with government backing, eventually transformed the marshland into 13,000 acres of spectacular birdland.

For inland exotica, there is the colony of blue-green monk parakeets from Argentina nesting as celebrities in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery on the R line. Legend says they represent the quintessential city saga — uninvited migrants that originally escaped from a broken shipping crate at Kennedy Airport. Humbler and soothing are the warblers of Staten Island and other Neotropical migrants on the subway map’s No. 8 stop, Clove Lakes Park. Individual birders have their own favorites and might debate points along the subway map’s 25 total stops. (Off the map, I prize the daily chutzpah of the average Broadway sparrow that nests in the crossbars of traffic lamps and swoops down fearlessly for the merest dropped bagel crumb.)

The best part of a subway birding trek may be the return train ride when the exhaustion of walking and witnessing other creatures inevitably shifts attention to fellow passengers — some humans aflutter with urgency, others stylishly tufted or perched eagle-eyed at the doors. “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” begins one of the Interloping Panhandlers ever migrating through the subways. And: “So, I go, like…” recounts the heedless Conversation Sharer, magpie loud on the el.

What would Audubon have made of the subway, or the subway map’s urging riders to thread a path to where birds beautifully gather?

“Never give up listening to the sounds of birds” was his advice. Of his passion, he conceded, “The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear.”